The importance of case reports in rare diseases

Case reports provide a wide range of details about the signs, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of certain diseases. The majority of case reports focus on different stages of a disease. For example, there are case reports that offer details about the connection between symptoms and diseases, if some unexpected event affected the patient’s state or appeared rare and unique features of a disease. Case reports have the role of highlighting novel and unusual features of diseases and they can help in creating new hypothesis for further research. Case reports have the role of bringing to attention new diseases and new aspects of old diseases. Some case reports focus nowadays on what side effects drugs have. For example, they are used to discover what mutations are responsible for certain diseases at elders through geriatry case report. Geriatric reports offer details about unexpected presentations of elders’ diseases, management of emerging diseases, adverse interactions or side effects of used medications or some unexpected symptoms that precede a disease.

Case reports proved to be very useful for cancer, which is the disease that leads to a high number of deaths nowadays. By comparing the result of both geriatric case reports and gynecologic oncology case report doctors receive a great help when trying to discover what disease is caused by certain symptoms. A recent case report offers information about a rare case of ovarian cancer at a 60-year-old woman. The report states that she presented right lower extremity swelling for a couple of days and no other symptoms. When doctors searched for her medical history, they find out that she suffered from chronic hepatitis C and right sided breast cancer 20 years ago. When the two types of case reports were studied doctors found a clue that this symptom may lead to ovarian cancer.

The fundamental requirement for the people that work at case reports is to have great observation skills that through analysis find the right disease that causes such symptoms. They are the central domain in medicine that detect new discoveries and ideas that help at scientific advancement. When someone suggests that a certain disease responds in a positive way when associated with a certain drug, case reports have the role of studying its effects to confirm or not the initial observation. It is widely known that they facilitated the recognition of adverse effects of treatments and new diseases. Cases are important in understanding how rare diseases evolve, what causes them, and how personalized treatments help. They play an important role in medical progress and randomized clinical trials are used to inspect variables and show all the details of a complicated medical situation. Doctors can find many aspects of a certain disease that affects their patients, and how they influence his evolution. When patients are involved in case reports there have to be considered their medical history, psychological aspects, diagnosis and physical examination. People will find published only the remarkable cases, because the other ones are used only as scientific evidence.